Trainee Chartered Accountant

Our scheme is designed to give you fast access to credible learning opportunities and the consideration to allow you to focus on what’s important“The role will require attending both the internally and externally provided study courses and application of the knowledge gained in the accounting, audit and tax departments of the firm. Trainees will be required to prepare statutory accounts, conduct the audit thereon, prepare tax returns as well as provide other professional advice. Approximately 70% of the time will be at clients’ premises conducting audits on the statutory accounts. Our clients are typically small-medium owner managed businesses over a wide range of industries.Trainees will study to become an ICAEW Chartered Accountant (ACA), typically requiring a minimum of three years practical work experience.As well as being numerate, key skills required include being self-motivated, accurate, a good communicator, as well as being able to manage their work load so as to ensure an efficient and timely delivery of services to our clients.”Location: East, West and South LondonNumber of positions available: 15 – across 3 offices Salary: Competitive, plus paid study leaveAll our trainee chartered accountants are initially trained in audit, and this usually continues for the entirety of the three years of the initial training contract. Graduate applicants will experience working at client premises for the majority of their time, initially assisting small teams in audit engagements.By the second to third year trainees are able to take a more senior role in the audit process and by the end of their training contract should be heading certain audit assignments.Audit is the process by which accountants examine and report upon the financial statements (accounts) of businesses. At the end of this process accountants state whether they believe that the financial statements have been “properly prepared” and show a “true and fair” view. What “properly prepared” and “true and fair” mean is not arbitrary, but is governed by statute and accounting standards. The process of forming audit judgements is also governed by audit standards. As a result, trainees are faced with vast amounts of material with which they need to be familiar in order to qualify as chartered accounts.To cope with this, trainees will receive training whilst at work, but also be sent on courses at top accountancy colleges in London. The courses used by Barnes Roffe are block release (as opposed to correspondence) as statistically these courses give the best possible chance of success in exams set by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).Trainees will work in a variety of business environments. Barnes Roffe operates in the “Owner Managed Business” (OMB) sector, with no further client specialism in terms of industry sector. As a result, trainees will experience looking after the affairs of companies and also the owners of those companies. There will be exposure early on to basic tax planning ideas particular to the OMB market. Unlike working for large listed companies our remit is to look at clients’ affairs more widely in terms of tax efficient strategies for wealth extraction and management.Our clients typically turn over £10m - £50m per annum. As a result individual assignments tend to last for weeks rather than months, an the key feature of the training with a medium sized practice like Barnes Roffe is therefore diversity of experience both in terms of industry type and areas of audit testing.We expect our trainees to work hard, and commit themselves to their studies. For the successful and ambitious the rewards are excellent. More than half the current partners trained with the firm and we regard all our trainees as potential partners of tomorrow. This job was originally posted as www.milkround.com/job/77499725